One of the many challenges of my job as an English teacher in the Basque Country is to inspire a level of understanding in my students on just how big the world is. Now living in a foreign country, the spectrum of cultural differences seems obvious to me, but for my my students, the [...]
The Foreign Policy blog recently gave charitable celebrity, Madonna, a chide or two for uprooting villagers in order to build her school in Malawi and I feel obligated to come to her defense. No one knows the real story, but what we do know is people love to complain about rich people who are [...]
In honor of the weekend and all of the mind-boggling, free-thinking that is coming out of the TED conference, I wanted to provide you with a little perspective on just how far we’ve come. “A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything” is a biro-pen hatched, animated flip book that more or less summarizes how [...]
Lesson # 15: Capturing the Knowledge
Last week our fearless Tech4Society event team leader put together a day devoted solely to distilling all of the knowledge we have or think we have about the invention and technology space within social entrepreneurship.
It’s a brilliant idea and a rare opportunity here at Ashoka to turn off email [...]
Yesterday I looked at reasons to be skeptical of metrics, which carry inherent dangers. However, that is not to say that metrics should be thrown out. Measures of your organization and its performance provide hugely valuable information when done well. Here are four tips for making the most of your metrics.
Let [...]
Are metrics imperfect? Can they do as much harm as good? Are they easily influenced by ideology and dogma?
The answer to all of these questions, of course, is “of course.” A recent New York Times piece by Anand Giridharadas does a nice job of pointing this out. There is an inherent danger in handing [...]
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Being an English teacher in a foreign country is rarely assumed to be on par with being a rock star, but sometimes I have to second-guess myself. I am somewhat famous in my school in Spain. The kids come up to me constantly to touch my hair, marvel at my tattoos, and pepper me [...]
The video above is one of the most eloquent and comprehensive explanations of the HIV/AIDS epidemic I ‘ve seen. In it, Hans Rosling, co-founder of Gapminder.org, discusses the progression of HIV/AIDS in the world with the Gapminder World data platform. The images are truly stunning. The lecture is even more stimulating as it reveals [...]
